Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Tuesday Roundup

Favorites and duds from today's commenting.

Favorites, in no particular order:

Here's a funny goofball question from WyclefChen in the Daily Screencap post. I have to resist the urge to call him "unstarred guy WyclefChen" now. To me, all you stars are still stars and anyone else is a gray job.

David Hume kicked ass today, first killing me with this awesome impersonation in the Chris Berman post and later bringing the house down with this amazing chef-tip in the Lance Armstrong post. That's a real doozy, the latter one. I'd also like to draw some attention to the reply from SavetoFavorites in the first comment - I know it amounts to a +1 and probably isn't intended this way, but the fact that he totally flubbed the naming of his Taco Bell selection strikes me as a perfectly SavetoFavorites kind of thing. Later, down the line, when I start acting like an adult and am no longer obsessing over Deadspin on a daily basis, it's this kind of stuff that I'll remember more than any particular joke: the real and specific and unique and wonderful voices and personalities of the individual commenters. Without recalling a particular Hume joke, for example, I doubt I'll forget his particular brand of humor any time soon.

I laughed at this Harold Reynolds dig from RMJ=H, also in the Chris Berman post. So good. There are some jokes you read and enjoy and move on from, and then there are those jokes you wish you'd made yourself. What's the difference? I can't put my finger on it, but this is one of the latter. It has something to do with the punchline relying upon something lifted verbatim or (in the case of a photo) unedited directly from the post and turned on its head, that feeling that you could have hit that same homerun had you just been as sharp and clever as the author.

I suppose I'm the only person who laughed at this simple sequence from Same Sad Echo in the Berman Mix post. Was I also the only person who laughed, like, a lot at the mix itself? God, I'm a moron.

Sponsored by V8 earned a mighty haul of +1s for this funny one-liner in the Bryce Harper post. I really am a moron. I needed a lot of time with this one. A lot. Had there not been a giant thread of +1s behind it, I might not have bothered to get there at all.

And finally, I really enjoyed this dialogue joke from The Amazing Sneijderman in the Bryce Harper post. The real shame is how this comment is buried under the also-ran arrow. I'm glad I checked.

Really?! We're still doing this, cobra, brah!? Surely, surely you can do better than that. For crying out loud, you had a star.

We Need Ninjas

I'm sure we've all seen this fucking abomination from Joe Gordon in the WFAN post. Clearly there's a difference between a dud, which is usually a bad joke or a spectacular misstep or brain-fail, and this kind of shit. If it were up to me, a little notification would pop up on my phone every time this kind of shit is said anywhere on earth, and with the push of a button I could send a hard wooden fist shooting up out of the ground directly into this person's genital area, right where they stand.

Whatever else is wrong or right about Kinja, whatever can be said in its defense, it cannot be argued that this kind of thing would ever ever ever have made it into any discussion on any post anywhere on Deadspin before the transition. Pink commenters have been lobbing this kind of shit at the filter since I've been around, but the approval system ultimately always won. And when approved and/or featured commenters went off the reservation, it wasn't long before the Comment Ninja Squadron came along to deliver (at best) a solid hip check.

Something's got to be done about this exact kind of thing, because behind all the tedious moaning and wailing and rending of garments, the chief concern, poo-pooed at every possible checkpoint, was the fear that these fucking yokels, these aptly-referenced Yahoos would suddenly have a voice and a presence on Deadspin that they'd never been granted before. And I was among those who dismissed that fear, but I'm given pause nowadays.

Look, I understand approvals and the hierarchical system ain't coming back. I'm encouraged to see cheese-mac make a reference to steps that may be taken to quiet the burner noise. I still think Deadspin needs ninjas. Active, ass-kicking moderators with the power to ship the kind of thing that will flat-out ruin Deadspin commenting off to the void. We can't have this kind of stuff. How are commenters supposed to not respond to that kind of ignorance? If I'm standing in a room with someone who says that kind of thing aloud, am I supposed to just ignore it? There's just no way. Moderators relieve the commenters of that burden and lower the likelihood that this kind of thing will escalate and come to dominate a given post. We had the best moderators anywhere, and we want them back.

Hey guys, I meant it when I said I'd try to keep this thing going as long and as often as I can. It's been a wild and crazy couple of weeks, and I'm not sure I'm totally out of the tall grass just yet, but I intend to bang out another of these tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'll poke my head in DUAN tonight if anyone wants to have a big stupid conversation about, I don't know, norbizness or something.

12 comments:

Great day all around, for Spin. Huge turnout and great questions for the live chat, Hume absolutely slaying everyone, the balog was jumping with an unusually low level of woe-is-me bitching, and best of all, and MBA roundup.

Fuck anyone who says this still isn't the best website on the planet.*

Yeah. It appears I've lost the battle on this one. I will say that all of my favorite comments are ones that got basically no attention. I'm sure it's like some shitty indie band bemoaning their only decent record that sold a few copies.

Shit. I'll have to join DUAN with a burner. My Miserable Shitehawk account seems to have been lost in the Kinja transition. I honestly can't remember if I've used it since the change, but anyway I can't use it now.

Mr. Shitehawk, I'm one of those who believe that no subject is untouchable, as long as it is both funny and takes a unique approach. So, my comment didn't elicit a slew of laughs, no biggie, I'm happy we have you around to keep everybody on point.

Well, of course we're all relying upon the same limited source material in each post for inspiration, so it's inevitable that there'll be a race to certain themes. That said, if it's the case that you usually just get there first, you deserve credit for being the sharpest in the bunch.

Besides, it has never seemed to me like you're grasping for the low-hanging fruit. You tend to operate in the realm of one-liners and wordplay jokes, and I think it will always feel like you scored a coup when you nail one of those. But those are also often the very best jokes in a given post.

First of all, RMJ, I think you are way off with that statement. You provide some of the best content on DS; last week, you absolutely tore things up. And no, it isn't always low-hanging fruit stuff either. However, I think your statement brings up a great chance to highlight a unique aspect of DS commenting: coming up with the perfect comment in a post where everyone is thinking the same thing. As Shitehawk says, there is a finite amount of material to go after in each post, unless commenters go off on entertaining tangents. Sometimes, it is a ton of fun trying to construct that perfect comment that you know everyone else is racing for on a specific post. You know the joke has to be great if it feels like an obvious topic, and you are just praying that you get it out there before someone ruins the concept with a fast and lazy attempt. I'll provide two of my favorites from last year where a commenter knocked one out of the park in these scenarios.The first belongs to you, RMJ, in the Pat Summitt dementia post.